Repeated Superdrive failures - does Apple care?

Question

My superdrive has failed, 8 days after expiration of the three year Apple care plan. This is a replacement drive, as the original Superdrive failed and was replaced a little more than a year ago. Another computer, an eMac purchased in July 2004, has also had to have its Superdrive replaced. Apple telephone support was completely unhelpful, because the three years of Apple Care coverage had expired. I guess I'll have to gut it up and pay for a replacement drive, but I'm more troubled by the timing of this failure (planned obsolescence?) and the fact that I've had three Superdrives fail in three years. I will someday want to replace my computer, and I've got another Apple-user headed off to college next year and I'm starting to wonder about Apple's reliability, at least for Superdrives. And yes, I know they're third-party produced, but Apple sure isn't doing much to help me. Anybody have any advice?

Answer 1

Wow, I'm sorry that you've had such bad luck. I have an iMac G4 1GHz with a Sony Superdrive (Sony DVD RW DW-U10A) that has also been acting up for about the past 2 years.
A year ago, I purchased a drive from Amazon.com (Marketplace) that was supposed to be a replacement. It turned out that the drive was bad so I had to send it back. When I had my machine all torn apart, my friend dusted the lens on my Sony drive. We put it all back together and it seemed to work fine. About a year later, it's started acting up again. My drive has had very light use in the 3 years that I've owned the computer. I'm sure that I've burned 5 DVDs or less and maybe a total of 10 CDs. It's doing the 'kerchunk' thing when trying to read CDs now.
I've given up and decided to take it apart again and replace the drive. I ordered a drive from this site -http://www.mcetech.com/dvdr16xdt-d.html, and also ordered memory for the factory memory slot (512MB) from this site - http://www.memoryx.net/.
I did not extend my AppleCare after my first year of ownership and always kicked myself for not doing this. I'm really sorry that your drive died 8 das after the expiration. Have you tried calling 800-SOS-APPL and explaining your situation?
I'm not sure why Apple has not addressed the problem of super drives with the flat panel iMacs. We've been talking about this on the boards for at least 2 years and I've yet to see anything in the media about this.
Sony did make my drive so I suppose that I could complain to them about the failure. I'm just tired of the whole thing, and hope that my replacement drive will fix my problems. I would also like to purchase a new Mac but I'm a bit scared off by all of the battery recalls.
Other than the super drive issue, I've been very happy with my iMac. I'd like to upgrade to 10.4 though and really need a working drive to do so.
Again, sorry to hear about your troubles. You're not alone but I don't think there is much that we can do about this.
iMac G4 17 FP   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   784MB RAM, 80 GB HD, 5G iPod